To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of radio theatre's death have been greatly exaggerated. It is certainly not as widely popular as it was in the Golden Age of Radio Theatre, the 1930s and '40s, when people all across the United States gathered around their radios to listen to "Amos 'n' Andy," "The Lone Ranger," "The Jack Benny Show" or "Fibber McGee and Molly." But it is popping up on local stations all over the country due to some stout souls dedicated to this so-called Theatre of the Mind.

One of those stations where radio theatre is alive and well is WKNH, Keene State's student-run station. Located on the third floor of the Lloyd P. Young Student Center – and at 91.3 FM – the station turns out a weekly program from 6 to 7 p.m. on Sundays, which includes not only some of those old classics of the '30s and '40s, but contemporary radio plays and original programs written by KSC students, community members and even area schoolchildren.

Janine Preston is the driving force behind radio theatre at KSC. An adjunct faculty member and the author of several radio plays, she began WKNH Radio Theatre in 1996 as a way to train student disk jockeys. That fall, the station aired a live play written by Preston titled "War of the Rock & Roll Worlds." About ten people participated.

"Students were nervous using the mikes," she says. "But after performing the play, they felt and sounded totally normal."

From that modest beginning, the radio theatre program has grown to include several Keene State faculty and staff, and community members from throughout the Monadnock region. Local organizations such as the Monadnock Writers' Group present prose and poetry on air, and children from local elementary schools write and perform original fables.

The program line-up includes annual holiday shows for Halloween and Christmas, dramatic readings, comedies, westerns, science fiction and more. One show, titled "The Waiting Room," has gained national exposure. Excerpts from the program are included in a national production distributed to National Public Radio stations throughout the country this spring. "The Waiting Room" is based on a book of poems by the same name written by Beverly Archibald, a Keene poet and geriatric nurse.

Since 2000, WKNH Radio Theatre has performed many of its shows on stage before a live audience in the Night Owl Café on the Keene State campus. Its most recent holiday show included more than 100 performers, sound effects personnel and technicians.

"Performing on stage live allows people to see how radio theatre is done," says Preston, "to see how the sound effects are made."

Producing the sound effects for radio theatre is a specialty in itself, says Preston. "It is the most challenging part of producing a show, but also the most rewarding.

"The sounds create the location," she adds, "and draw the audience to that place so it becomes part of the story. The audience must be able to hear movement in time and space so it can imagine what the location looks like and where the people are."

WKNH Radio Theatre uses many of the same techniques for sound used in the old-time radio programs of the 1930s and '40s, including coconut shells for horse or reindeer hooves, heavy duty cellophane for a crackling fire, heavy sheet metal for thunder, and an emery board and stick for striking a match. They've also come up with their own inventions, such as an old jewelry box closing for creaking door hinges, a TV tray dropping into place to sound like the door of a washing machine closing, and taped pliers to simulate a gun dropping on the floor.

"It has to sound right for the mike, not the ear," Preston says. "Sometimes the actual item does not make the right sound in front of the microphone or over the radio, and a creative sound effects staff must come up with a solution."

Preston says that, today, radio theatre is more aptly called audio theatre. "Radio theatre" is not broad enough to cover the whole field in which many works are produced as much for tape and the Internet as for broadcast.

Not surprisingly, she is a strong proponent for radio or audio theatre as an art form. She describes it as a "play for the ears that creates a visual image. There's no body language, no stage sets, no visuals at all. Everything must come across with sound.

"Radio theatre allows the audience to use its imagination," she says. "Five people can listen to the same show and have five different concepts of how the characters look. And they're all right. Listeners create their own unique version of the show within their mind.

"A whole generation has grown up knowing exactly what a space alien or a gremlin looks like," she adds. "We're losing the delight of making our own pictures."

Kate Phillips, a retired Hollywood actress and writer, and current adjunct professor at KSC, also bemoans the lack of imagination and creativity in today's entertainment world. She has performed often on WKNH Radio Theatre and is the director of a science fiction play now in production, "The Death Guard."

"There's such a lack of imagination in today's entertainment world," she says. "It is robbing the audience of the chance to be creative. In radio theatre, you can leave certain things openended and the audience fills in the details.

"The average person is highly creative," she adds, "but doesn't know it. There's little opportunity to be original anymore. By listening to radio theatre, you have to imagine. What Janine is doing is putting us in the position of being discoverers."

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